Microsoft Releases H.264 Extension for Google Chrome

With Google recently announcing plans to remove support for H.264 video playback in its Chrome web browser, Microsoft has decided to release its own H.264 extension for Chrome. Dubbed the Windows Media Player HTML5 Extension for Chrome, this extension enables Chrome users to play H.264-encoded videos (aka MP4) on HTML5 pages by using the built-in capabilities found in Windows 7.

The company is providing more information about this decision in two related blog posts:

We believe that Windows customers should be able to play mainstream HTML5 video and, as we’ve described in previous posts, Internet Explorer 9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec.

H.264 is an excellent and widely-used video format that serves the web very well today. As such, we will continue to ensure that developers and customers continue to have an optimal Web experience.

Setting aside the speculation about the reasons and objectives, this [Google] announcement has created instability and uncertainty around video on the Web. To get back on track, technical enthusiasts, developers, businesses, and consumers need consistent and sustainable answers to many questions about [Google's] WebM [video format].

Microsoft’s Point of View

Any browser running on Windows can play H.264 video via the built-in Windows APIs that support the format. Our point of view here is that Windows customers should be able to play mainstream video on the Web. We’ve provided Windows 7 customers who choose to run Mozilla Firefox an add-on to enable playing H.264 video on Web pages with the HTML5 video tag. Today we’re making available a similar plug-in for Google Chrome.

Our point of view is totally clear. Our support for H.264 results from our views about a robust Web and video ecosystem that provides a rich level of functionality, is the product of an open standards process like the W3C’s HTML5 specification, and has been free from legal attacks. Microsoft is agnostic and impartial about the actual underlying video format for HTML5 video as long as this freedom continues.

Discuss this Article 3

So they're basically saying that users of Windows 7 get a better internet experience that on another OS, even if they want to use Chrome or Firefox.

Smart.

BTW Paul: Generalizing H.264 as "MP4" sounds about intelligent as saying "quad-core Core 2 Duo". It's only one level of MPEG-4 (it's "Part 10"), and there are numerous parts (specifications). In fact, if I wanted to be a complete dick, I'd just say you were wrong because "MP4" is just a container file format that's specified under MPEG-4 Part 14, but I'm not judging... ;)

PS: WMP will play any H.264 video stream inside practically any container (except Quicktime from my experience, probably due to the header info). Whether or not this new plugin will redirect a file with something other than an MP4 container file to WMP remains to be seen. However, if it's in an MP4 container, it's likely that the video stream could be encoded with any codec that WMP plays back.

I do wish I could have Quicktime files playing on Windows Media Player. I have to use Quicktime and its so dated. Its such a pain having to move the window around before I can get to the bottom right corner to adjust its size.

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